In ancient Greece we find a law of bankruptcy resting on slavery. In Athens, about the time of Solon’s legislation (594 B. C.), the bulk of the population who had originally been small proprietors became gradually indebted to the rich to such an extent that they were practically slaves; those who nominally owned their property owed more than they could pay, and stone pillars erected on their land showed the amount of the debts and the names of the lenders. Solon’s remedy for this state of affairs was to cancel all debts made on the security of the land or the person of the debtor, and at the same time he enacted that henceforth no loans could be made on the bodily security of the debtor, and the creditor was confined to a share of the property. In Rome’s early history practically the same conditions prevailed as in Greece. About 500 B. C. an attempt was made to remedy the evil by providing a maximum rate of interest, no alteration being made, however, in the law of debt. In the course of a few centuries the free farmers were utterly destroyed. The pressure of war and taxes and usury drove all into debt and into practical, if not technical, slavery. The old law of debt was not really abolished until the dictatorship of Julius Cæsar, who then practically adopted Solon’s legislation of more than five centuries before, but too late to save the middle class. In the course of centuries and the evolution of civilization chattel slavery has been abolished; but the slavery of debt still remains, and usury is now, as it was in all the history of mankind, the tool with which debt forges the chains of nations. It is not the province of this work to examine into the conditions of other countries than our own, but the facts now to be presented will convince the thoughtful reader that the American people are bound by chains of debt which it will require the wisest statesmanship to break. Representative Warner of Massachusetts (Republican), in a speech delivered in Congress in 1894, stated that the interest-bearing debts of the United States, public and private, aggregated a grand total of $32,000,000,000 (thirty-two billions of dollars). This would be bad enough, but careful estimates by conservative students of political economy show that the amount is very much larger. W. H. Harvey, author of “Coin’s Financial School,” makes the following itemized estimate of the interest-bearing debts of this country, public and private. Most of the figures are derived from recognized official sources: The national debt, according to the official census of 1890, was $ 891,960,104 State and municipal debts (census 1890). 1,135,210,442 Railroad bonds, 1892 (“Poor’s Manual,” 1893) 5,463,611,204 Debt on farms and homes occupied by owner (R. R. Porter, Supt. Eleventh Census, in _North American Review_, vol. 153, p. 618) 2,500,000,000